Israel agrees short cessation after four boys killed in Gaza

Israeli artillery troops were positioned near the Gaza border this morning, as Israel resumed its air strikes in the Gaza Strip a day after an Egyptian-proposed cease-fire deal failed to get Hamas militants to halt rocket attacks. Video: Reuters

An Israeli artillery unit fires a shell towards the Gaza Strip from a location in southern Israel. Photograph: Jim Hollander/EPA

People play on the beach beside a bomb shelter in the southern Israeli city of Ashdod yesterday. Israel resumed air strikes in the Gaza Strip after agreeing to an Egyptian-proposed ceasefire deal that failed to get Hamas militants to halt rocket attacks. Photograph: Amir Cohen/Reuters

People react in Tel Aviv as explosions are heard overhead as the Iron Dome anti-missile defence system intercepts rockets fired from the Gaza. Photograph: Finbarr O’Reilly/Reuters

The Iron Dome air-defense system fires to intercept a rocket over the city of Ashdod, Israel, today. Photograph: Ilia Yefimovich/Getty Images

Israel has tonight agreed to a proposed six-hour cessation of hostilities in the Gaza Strip for humanitarian reasons, a Israeli senior official said.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it had not yet been decided when the lull would take place. Hamas had no immediate comment.

The appeal was made by a United Nations official, the official said, confirming Israeli media reports, shortly after Hamas rejected an Egyptian-proposed ceasefire to end the nine-day war in which 215 Palestinians and an Israeli have died.

Israeli shelling killed four boys on a Gaza beach today, a local health official said earlier, and Palestinian militants fired a further 70 rockets into Israel after a failed Egyptian attempt to halt the warfare.

Israel urged the evacuation of several districts in the Gaza Strip where more than 100,000 people live, threatening ground operations to try to stem the rocket attacks.

An Israeli official said the defence minister had earlier asked prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s security cabinet to authorise the mobilisation of another 8,000 reserve troops. The military has said about 30,000 reservists have been called up since the Israeli offensive began a week ago.

Israeli experts predicted overland raids in the Gaza Strip to destroy command bunkers and tunnels that have allowed the outgunned Palestinians to withstand air and naval barrages and keep the rockets flying.

The Hamas political leadership had formally rejected an earlier ceasefire plan from Cairo today, a spokesman for the Islamist group said, a day after its armed wing spurned it and kept up rocket salvoes at Israel, which had held its fire for six hours yesterday.

Ashraf al-Qidra of the Gaza Health Ministry said shelling from an Israeli gunboat off Gaza’s Mediterranean coast killed four boys - two aged 10 and the others 9 and 11 - from one family and critically wounded another youngster on the beach.

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An Israeli military spokesman had no immediate comment. Mr Netanyahu said the armed forces try to avoid civilian casualties but that militant rocket crews deliberately put non-combatants at risk by operating in densely populated residential areas.

Ahmed Abu Hassera, who witnessed the incident at the shore, told Reuters: “The kids were playing on the beach. They were all ... under the age of 15.”

“When the first shell hit land, they ran away but another shell hit them all,” said Abu Hassera, whose shirt was stained with blood. “It looked as if the shells were chasing them.”

Reacting to the incident, Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri told reporters in Gaza: “These crimes will not succeed to break our will. We will continue the confrontation and resistance and we promise [Israel] will pay the price for all these crimes.”

Earlier, Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip killed at least eight Palestinians, five of them civilians, and a six-year-old boy died of wounds sustained a few days ago, Gaza medics said.

Gaza health officials say most of the Palestinian dead from in the worst flare-up of violence with Israel in two years have been civilians.

Gaza’s Al-Mezan Center for Human rights said 259 houses had been demolished by Israeli air strikes and 1,034 damaged along with 34 mosques and four hospitals.

The rocket volleys from Gaza have made the race to shelters a daily routine for hundreds of thousands in the Jewish state. One Israeli has been killed in the rocket fire. Most of the projectiles involved have crashed on open ground or been intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile shield.

The military said Iron Dome shot down 23 of the 70 rockets launched at Israel today, while the others struck without causing casualties. One salvo, at coastal Ashkelon, forced visiting Norwegian foreign minister Borge Brende into a shelter.

In Gaza’s eastern Shejaia and Zeitoun districts, bastions of popular support for Hamas and the Islamic Jihad faction, there was no sign that residents were heeding the Israeli call to leave.

Authorised by Mr Netanyahu’s security cabinet to escalate the offensive, the military relayed warnings to inhabitants in northern Gaza with dropped leaflets and mass phone calls.

“Failure to comply will endanger your lives and the lives of your family,” said a recorded message received by residents of Shejaia and Zeitoun, which sprawl out to the barbed-wire border with Israel.

Maher Abu Saa’ed, a 45-year-old doctor in Zeitoun, said that with many areas of Gaza under attack, nowhere was safe and he would not leave despite a telephoned Israeli warning to get out.

“To ask hundreds of people to leave their houses and go to the centre of the city is insane, a sick joke,” he said.

World powers have urged calm, worried about spiralling casualties in one of the world’s most crowded areas.

Hamas leaders have previously said any Gaza ceasefire must include an end to Israel’s blockade of the territory, recommitment to a truce reached in an eight-day war there in 2012 and the release of hundreds of its activists arrested in the occupied West Bank while Israel hunted for three abducted Jewish seminary students.

The three teens were later found dead, and a Palestinian youth was later murdered in what appeared a revenge attack by Israelis. Those killings led to the current bout of hostilities.

Hamas also wants Egypt to ease curbs at its Rafah crossing with Gaza, imposed after the toppling of Islamist president Mohamed Mursi in Cairo a year ago.